P. Arkadiev. Unmarked resultatives in Abaza and passive lability // N. Sumbatova, I. Kapitonov, M. Khachaturyan, S. Oskolskaya, S. Verhees (eds.). Songs and Trees: Papers in Memory of Sasha Vydrina. St. Petersburg: Institute for Linguistic Studies, Russia
P. Arkadiev. Unmarked resultatives in Abaza and passive lability // N. Sumbatova, I. Kapitonov, M. Khachaturyan, S. Oskolskaya, S. Verhees (eds.). Songs and Trees: Papers in Memory of Sasha Vydrina. St. Petersburg: Institute for Linguistic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, 2023. P. 485-505.
This paper describes the peculiar unmarked objective resultative construction in Abaza, a polysynthetic Northwest Caucasian language. I discuss the degree of similarity of this construction and its inceptive derivate to the cross-linguistic prototype of the passive. Given that the Abaza resultative is morphologically unmarked, I argue that it can be considered an instance of “passive lability”, which is a characteristic trait of the Mande languages. I also propose a tentative typology of passive lability based on the parameters of productivity, Aktionsart and the availability of agent expression.